


Nightwalker

by LaFlashdrive



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-07
Updated: 2014-11-07
Packaged: 2018-02-24 10:25:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2578190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaFlashdrive/pseuds/LaFlashdrive
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You forget all about champagne. You forget about the band. You forget that this is a dream, that when you wake up none of this will be real and you’ll never own this dress or waltz to this song or see what Carmilla looked like before she was a vampire ever again. You don’t care though. Not right now. You leave the thought to bother you later, to come up at another time when Carmilla’s hand, warm and soft, isn’t in your own and her lips, swollen and red, are not mere inches away from yours.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nightwalker

Torches light the hall. A chandelier, sparkling and grandiose, swings over your head to the beat of the music played at the front of the gallery. The dress draping your fame isn’t exactly comfortable but it’s beautiful and you don’t care that it scratches your skin.

Then another beauty catches your eye, one that outshines yours, out sparkles the chandelier. Carmilla is made for the clothes she wears, comfortable in them in a practiced grace you will never be able to imitate. Then you remember that it was the clothes that were made for her and you think it must be nice to be the daughter of a Count.  
When she walks towards you, your shoes are glued to the floor.

“A dance, M’lady?”

Her hand is outstretched towards you and her midriff is slightly bowed above the ruffles in her gown. You take her hand with a blush. You are the one supposed to be referring to her in titles, to be curtseying to her when she presents herself before you. This is Carmilla’s world, the one she was born in, the one she was supposed to die in. You are on very different terms here, and you wish you knew how to naturally adjust yourself to the times the way she could.

You almost stumble over your own two feet on your way to the dance floor, and you’re afraid your waltz will be even less graceful. Your feet feel heavy here, foreign, and your dress seems to be weighing you down. Carmilla notices what a klutz you are, and the embarrassment is mortifying.

“Been drinking the champagne without me, cupcake?”

There’s a smile in her voice and her stark white teeth tease you behind red lips, peeled back smugly. You notice she doesn’t have fangs anymore, and you involuntarily think about what her mouth would feel like on your neck without them. The thought makes you flush all the more scarlet.

“No,” you defend because you haven’t been drinking. You don’t even drink that much. You did a couple jaeger bombs with Betty, but Betty hasn’t been born yet and jaeger bombs haven’t been invented. Besides. Drinking would ruin the clarity of this moment, and you don’t want to forget the way Carmilla’s eyes are more golden here, not as dark when released from the plague of death. You don’t want to forget the way they’re locked on you, either, don’t want to forget how those honey brown irises look at you like you are the real nectar to be tasted, eaten in a different way than Carmilla is used to eating now after centuries of vampiric control.

You realize your shoulders are tight, and Carmilla twirls you in her arms to relax you, make you feel light on your feet. Your head seems to spin more than your body. When she pulls you back in, tucks you close to her, the room still ripples, like air distorted by waves of summer heat. Suddenly you’re hot even though it’s a cool fall night and you wouldn’t be surprised if it started to snow in a couple of weeks.

“Good,” she purrs in your ear as she laces your fingers together. “I want to see the look on your face when you taste good champagne for the first time. You never drank the last glass I gave you.”

You remember that champagne. The fizzy beige drink was too expensive for your budget and probably too exquisite for your pallet, too. You hadn’t taken so much as even a sip of it. You’d been careful after Perry suggested Carmilla might be putting something in people’s drinks. You’d found it suspicious that she’d poured so much more for you than she did for herself, though you recognize that now as an act of generosity rather than one of deception. You wish you’d taken a taste, wondered if Carmilla still had the rest of that bottle hidden somewhere in your dorm room. Even though you wish you’d taken the opportunity then, you’d settle for drinking it now here in your dreams.

“I want to try it.”

Carmilla giggles at your eagerness and a hint of something flashes in her eye that you think is experience. She’s done this before, the teenaged goading and pressuring of peers to drink for the first time. She wants to corrupt you, but her intentions here are so minor compared to the evil ones she carries in the real world that she seems innocent for once, even though she isn’t. Never was. Never will be.

“Slow down, cutie. Let’s dance first.”

You don’t have time to protest or agree before Carmilla is spinning you around, guiding your feet into the center of the dance floor. Even though you are surrounded by so many other kids, their wealthy parents, and the hovering overtones of culture and politics, it feels like you and Carmilla are the only ones in the room.

You forget all about champagne. You forget about the band. You forget that this is a dream, that when you wake up none of this will be real and you’ll never own this dress or waltz to this song or see what Carmilla looked like before she was a vampire ever again. You don’t care though. Not right now. You leave the thought to bother you later, to come up at another time when Carmilla’s hand, warm and soft, isn’t in your own and her lips, swollen and red, are not mere inches away from yours. The closeness oppresses your ability to think anyway, and the only thing your mind seems to be aware of is your body’s question of where this night will end up, if Carmilla’s lips will sew themselves to yours by the end of the evening or if things will go so much further than that. You wonder if Carmilla’s house is nearby. If her house is a mansion. If her mansion is a castle. You wonder if your own walls will come crashing down like those of the Karnstein manor certainly have by now in the twenty first century if Carmilla presses her body into yours, folds the layers of your gowns together, makes the two of you one.

She doesn’t kiss you, though. She doesn’t kiss you and you don’t see where she lives and you don’t collapse onto the sheets of her bed. The song ends, the band puts their instruments down, and Carmilla untangles your fingers, surrenders control of your feet and your palm back to your own body. You don’t even want the independence.  
Slowly Carmilla pulls away, but her eyes never leave you and yours never leave her. “I’ll go get those drinks for us.”

Your throat is dry and you want the champagne, but you don’t want Carmilla to leave and your body protests as your mouth struggles to form the words you feel so strongly in your gut. “Don’t go!” No noise comes out and you aren’t sure your lips are moving either. Your forehead feels sweaty. You try again to no avail. “Don’t go!” Carmilla doesn’t hear you. She backs away, so slowly you aren’t sure she’s moving until the entire room starts spinning again and everything goes fuzzy indiscriminately. In one last effort you scream it, even though you can’t see Carmilla anymore and her dark locks are just a smudge of black in the edge of your vision. You can’t even hear yourself this time.

You wake up gasping in your room, sucking in twenty first century air that feels more polluted even though the only thing you smell is bleach and Perry has cleaned your room from top to bottom even more thoroughly than your dad did when you were growing up. The lights are on and you realize it isn’t night. It’s a weekend morning and outside the clock tower is chiming and the Summer Society is practicing for their track and field meet. It is not a magical night in 1698, you are not dancing at a ball, and Carmilla still has not kissed you.

Perry is awake, cleaning some more, making something at your sink that you think is the brownie mix the two of you bought the night before. She side steps around the sleeping body of Carmilla, curled up on the floor without so much as even a blanket, to feed you a spoonful of the slurry as breakfast. Even though Perry thinks you might get salmonella from the raw eggs, she tells herself one little taste can’t hurt because she knows brownie batter is like cookie dough and it’s more comforting when it’s unbaked. Comfort is important right now.

“Thank heavens you’re awake,” she says, smoothing your wild hair back on the top of your skull like you always imagined your mother would if you had one. “Carmilla and I have been up for hours already. I’ve run out of things to clean, and I need to make her bed. I wanted to wake you up sooner, but Carmilla told me to let you sleep. I suppose you did need the extra rest.”

Perry marches back to the sink, hips swinging in productive fervor. When she steps out of the way and you sit up, you can see Carmilla on the floor again, and you realize this time that she is awake, though her position curled up on her side fools you. For a moment you wonder why she’s still laying there, why she’s awake already, but then she catches you staring and you look away and blush in embarrassment. 

You lick the chocolate off your lips and wonder if she tastes just as sweet.

“I’m going to go bake these,” Perry announces satisfied, carrying the bowl and your glass baking tray at her hip. “You better be up and dressed by the time I get back. I really need to vacuum away the crumbs around that bed.” Perry marches out of your room at a pace so fast you couldn’t even manage it if the dean herself was chasing you down the campus mall, and you wonder how she has such a passion for domestic activities. You wonder what the rush is.

You try to think about Perry and LaFontaine and how the taller redhead must be missing her partner more than anything, but just the thought of their relationship brings your mind back to Carmilla which draws your eyes back to the figure on your floor. She’s still staring at you, but you can’t ignore her this time, can’t pretend not to be interested.  
“Why are you up so early?” you ask her. It’s got to be nearing noon. Noon was like midnight for vampires. Carmilla should be fast asleep at this time. She shouldn’t be up for another few hours.

Carmilla looks at you like you’re missing something, like the answer to your question should be obvious.

“I never went to bed, cupcake.”

Gilt lurches in your stomach, twists your insides into every knot your dad taught you how to tie on camping trips to learn how to fend for yourself should you ever end up stranded in the wild. You took her bed from her. You kept her from sleeping while you selfishly had the best night’s sleep you’d had in weeks and dreamt of her and romance and fantasy the entire night. “I’m sorry,” you apologize. “I shouldn’t have slept in your bed. I knew the floor was too uncomfortable for you. I could’ve laid down there. I-“

Carmilla sits up, laughs, places a hand on your knee. “Calm down, sweetheart. My lack of sleep has nothing to do with being on the floor. I slept in a coffin for seventy years, remember? I can deal with hard surfaces. I was just busy last night is all. I went out.”

You feel a little better, but you still feel guilty. You try not to, though, because it means you care too much. You’re the human. She’s the vampire. She offered to take care of you, not the other way around. She’s stronger than you, smarter than you. You couldn’t help her even if you wanted to. That thought makes you feel guilty, too, but you try to shake it off once more.

“You went out?” You wonder how Carmilla snuck past Perry, what she had to do, who she had to see. You try not to sound too interested when you ask, “Where’d you go?”  
Carmilla’s hand falls from your knee, slides back into her lap. A smile brightens her features as her eyes bore into yours. “I went to a ball,” she declares dreamily. “Waltzed until the sun went down. Danced with a pretty girl. I lost her when I left to get us drinks, though.”

Carmilla’s eyes pierce you as her words sink in, as you realize that maybe what happened last night had been more than just a dream.

She falls to the floor again, lays her side on the tile, turns to you one last time before closing her eyes. “Goodnight, cutie.”

You watch her fall asleep.


End file.
